Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Please help with my RootsTech talk

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How does perfectionism get in your way?Back in late September, I created a post asking for your input on the impact of perfectionism in genealogy as I worked on my RootsTech talk, “The Imperfect Genealogist.” I was surprised when I didn’t get much of a response and I then I discovered that an updated security package with my GoDaddy account had turned off commenting as a default and I didn’t realize it.

I’m getting back to work on my talk (it’s due next month!) and thought I’d try again. Thanks very much to those of you who replied to the September post after I got comments up and running! I’d love to hear more from others in comments to this post. Here’s what I wrote in September.

I think about perfectionism a lot. It’s the topic of the podcast I co-host with my friend and life coach Shannon Wilkinson every week. But lately I’ve been thinking about it particularly in relation to genealogy, since I’m working on my RootsTech talk next year, called “The Imperfect Genealogist.”

Here are some ways I have seen perfectionism causing genealogists to stall in their research:

  • You don’t know how to do source citations correctly, so you don’t do them at all.
  • You haven’t come up with the perfect way to organize your research, so you just keep doing research without organizing it.
  • You don’t have a whole weekend to devote to your genealogy research, so you don’t do any research at all.
  • You don’t know the very best way to preserve your archival documents, so you let them languish in an unsafe, non-archival environment. (We discussed this very thing on Episode 20 of Getting to Good Enough.)

It’s your turn. Can you help me out and let me know  how perfectionism can get in the way of your genealogy life? Please share the things you tend to get perfectionistic about and the impact it can have. (If you’ve figured out strategies for getting past that, I’m all ears!) Just leave a comment on this post. I’m sure you’ll contribute things I haven’t even thought of!

 

October 30 x 30 wrap up: How’d it go?

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It’s last day of October. (October felt very long to me!) For those of you who participated in the 30 x 30 challenge in which you committed to doing 30 minutes of genealogy research for 30 days in a row (or some variation, at your discretion), I’d love to hear how the challenge went for you!

As I mentioned in my mid-month update, I had a blockbuster first half of the month. The only day I failed to research in the first 26 days of the challenge was (ironically enough) the day I posted that update. I had two trips in October, one to Walla Walla to visit my dad for a week followed shortly by a five-day trip to New York City to pal around with my college buddies (which was heaven). I managed daily research all the way to my penultimate day in New York, which was October 26. But when I got home after so much travel I had to hit the ground running with appointments and other obligations for my organizing business. So I’m ending the month with a whimper.

But I’m very proud that I researched 25 out of the first 26 days of the month. I love how daily research keeps me connected with my ancestors and my research.

In November I’ll be working every day on my novel for National Novel Writing Month, so I’m thinking I won’t get a lot of genealogy research done. Maybe I’ll surprise myself. I think I’ll start another 30 x 30 challenge in January. I hope you’ll join me!

In the meantime, please report in, if you’d like!

Using Scrivener to help with transcribing

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I am participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) next month, in which I (along with about a half million other people) will be attempting to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. Call me crazy, but that’s my idea of a fun challenge. (I do it every five years, and this is my fourth novel. I blogged about it yesterday on my organizing blog.)

Last week, I decided to download a free trial of Scrivener, software designed for people who are writing long documents. I’ve heard about Scrivener over the years but was never really tempted to try it until this year when I took a look at this introductory video and realized how helpful it would be for me in writing my novel. So for the last couple of days I’ve been taking tutorials in preparation for using it to write my novel in November.

Another thing I’ve been working on the last couple of days is transcribing a long, delightful newspaper feature that was written about my paternal grandparents in 1979. They were the founders of a small-town weekly newspaper, the Franklin County Graphic in Connell, Washington, whose first issue was published in 1954. (My grandfather, a life-long newspaperman, was 50 when he and my grandmother decided to take on this adventure!) They sold the paper in 1975 and on the 25th anniversary of the founding, the newspaper published a long, two-part feature on them.

My aunt had given me a clipping of the second part of the feature when I saw her a couple of weeks ago and I emailed the newspaper to see if they would send me the first part. They cheerfully complied, but the resolution of the image they sent is not the greatest.

So I decided to transcribe the article so that my dad could read it. (He doesn’t have a computer.) I started yesterday by opening the article in Preview (my Mac’s pdf reader) and toggling back and forth between it and Pages (my Mac’s work processing program). I’m pretty good at it (it’s how I transcribed my 2nd great grandfather’s 138-document Civil War pension file), but it’s a little clunky and time consuming.

This morning, it dawned on me that I could use Scrivener for transcribing genealogy documents to make the process a whole lot easier. In Scrivener, you can store images in a research folder and you can split your screen and see two things at once. So I split the screen vertically and put the article I’m transcribing on the left and the text document of the transcription on the right. Since I’m transcribing a newspaper article published in single columns, this view is excellent. (You can also split the screen horizontally.) Now, instead of switching back and forth from Preview to Pages, I just keep my eyes on the article I’m transcribing and touch type. It’s so much easier and faster!

I can export the document as a Rich Text Format file or as a Word document, so I’m not tied to Scrivener for reading the transcription.

Since Scrivener is brand new to me, I had to figure out how to do this. It wasn’t not hard, but it was also not completely intuitive for me yet. I was going to try to post step-by-step instructions here, but I realized that if you need help you’re better off getting help from the Scrivener site or from another site written by someone who’s actually knowledgeable about the program. But I found it to be easy to do, even as a novice.

I downloaded Scrivener using a NaNoWriMo free trial, which extends the free trial a few days beyond the standard 30 days and also offers a 50 percent discount if you actually write a 50,000 word novel. If you don’t, there’s a 20 percent discount on the license fee. The non-discounted license fee is $49.

When I downloaded Scrivener, I wasn’t thinking about genealogy at all. But now I’m getting kind of excited thinking of the genealogy applications this split screen might offer. It will probably be enough to justify purchasing the license after the free trial expires! Scrivener has come up in the comments on this blog a few times (including today, when Teresa mentioned she belongs to a Scrivener users Facebook group) and I’m glad I finally paid attention.

If you use Scrivener, I’m curious about if you use it for genealogy purposes. Please let me know in the comments!

Edited to add: The day after I wrote this, I finished transcribing the long article and doing it in Scrivener made it so much easier and more enjoyable! I think it cut the amount of time in half that it took to transcribe. Two thumbs up!

NARA 2019 Virtual Genealogy Fair is tomorrow!

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This one really snuck up on me.

The 2019 Virtual Genealogy Fair is being offered (free of charge) by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) tomorrow, Wednesday, October 23, 2019. This is the seventh year for the conference, offered by webcast on YouTube. It’s a wonderful resource.

You can read the lineup, with detailed descriptions of the sessions and links to handouts, here. Just click on each session title to access the handouts. There will be six one-hour sessions, bookended by opening and closing remarks. The event starts at 10 am eastern and ends at 4.

I’m traveling tomorrow, so I was thrilled to read that I don’t have to watch live. The webcast will be available on YouTube to watch later. You can even request transcripts of the sessions, taken from the closed captioning.

While you’re on the 2019 Virtual Fair webpage, scroll down to access links to prior Virtual Genealogy Fairs sponsored by NARA. Those are available to watch as well!